Vostok (spacecraft)

Vostok, Russian for East, was a class of single-pilot crewed spacecraft built by the Soviet Union and designed by Sergei Korolev's OKB-1 bureau. The first human spaceflight was made with Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961 by the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The Vostok programme made six crewed spaceflights from 1961 through 1963, ending with Vostok 6 and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, on 16 June 1963. Two later flights of Vostok spacecraft modified for up to three crew were flown in 1964 and 1965 as Voskhod, and by the late 1960s Soyuz spacecraft replaced them. The design was meant to serve both as a camera platform for the Zenit spy satellite program and as a crewed craft, and its crewed version, the Vostok 3KA, first flew on 9 March 1961. The capsule was about 2.43 m across and 4.55 m long.